A purchase request is raised on Monday. The approver needs about ten minutes to read and sign it. The requester gets an answer two weeks later. Where did the other thirteen and a half days go?
Almost always, the answer is waiting. The request sat in an inbox, came back for a missing quotation, waited for someone on leave, or was forwarded to a second approver nobody knew about. The actual work took minutes. The process took weeks.
Measure the waiting, not the working
Before changing anything, measure two numbers for a handful of recent requests:
- Lead time. The calendar time from when the request was raised to when the requester got a decision.
- Touch time. The time people actually spent working on it: reading, checking, signing.
Divide touch time by lead time and you get the process cycle efficiency. For a ten-minute approval that took two weeks, it is well under one percent. That is common, and it tells you something important: speeding up the approver will not help. Removing the waiting will.
The usual causes
- Incomplete requests. The form does not ask for what the approver needs, so it bounces back.
- Unclear ownership. Nobody is sure who approves what, so requests are forwarded around.
- Approval limits set too low. Small, routine amounts climb the same ladder as large ones.
- Steps in a line that could run side by side. Finance and the department head review one after the other when they could review at the same time.
- No visibility. The requester cannot see status, so they chase, which adds more messages to already full inboxes.
- Absence without cover. One approver on leave stops everything.
Fix the rules before you automate
Automating a broken approval process just produces broken approvals faster. Work through these in order:
- Remove steps. Ask of each approval: what would go wrong if this step did not exist? If the answer is nothing, remove it.
- Raise limits for routine items. Let managers approve small, budgeted spending without escalation.
- Make requests complete on the first try. Require the quotation, budget code and justification up front.
- Name a delegate for every approver. Absence should reroute work automatically, not stop it.
- Then automate. Route requests to the right approver, show status to everyone, and send reminders before a request goes stale.
What automation adds
Once the rules are clear, a simple workflow tool can route each request to the right approver based on type and amount, notify approvers on the channel they actually read, escalate automatically after an agreed time, and keep a record for audit. AI can help too, for example by checking that the right documents are attached before a request is submitted.
A quick self-check
- Can a requester see where their request is without asking anyone?
- Do you know your average approval lead time?
- Does a routine request under your spending limit need more than one approver?
- What happens to requests when an approver is on leave?
If you cannot answer the first two, start by measuring. If the answers to the last two worry you, the fixes above will make a difference within weeks.